Panel: The Myth of the Dangerous Panel, The Riverside Church

The conference will challenge the conventional wisdom that has taken hold throughout this nation as consensus grows that mass incarceration is a failed system: “We should release from prison and offer support to only those who are “low risk,” i.e. only those who’ve committed nonviolent crimes.” President Obama echoed this conventional wisdom recently when he took his message of reform to an Oklahoma prison and said “…I don’t have tolerance for violent criminals. Many of them may have made mistakes, but we need to keep our communities safe.”

The counterintuitive reality is that the really “low risk” people are in fact those who have the longer sentences for violent crimes, homicide in particular.

Lasting and effective change in the criminal justice system—and in society as a whole—cannot happen if America fails to include in its reforms the millions of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people who committed violent crimes. This topic—where, of course, the issue of race looms large—is of such importance that a thoughtful public conversation at this conference is called for.